by Sasha Chapin
Okay, that actually wasn’t his name. But, as my publisher’s trusty lawyer told me, my opponents could sue me if they claim I’ve depicted them dishonestly and/or unflatteringly. So I’ve given them extremely realistic alternate names, like Joseph Diaphragm, as a way of protecting their identities.
We chatted amiably before the game began. I could barely listen—the noise inside my head muted his speech.
“I’m a reporter who can’t play chess,” I said.
“I work on submarines,” he said.
“So you’ll cry deep underwater if I beat you,” I said.
“I suppose so.”
“You won’t be crying, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I’m an unrated player.”
A note on ratings: every player registered with FIDE,the world chess federation, is given a numerical grade upon which their happiness depends entirely. It’s an instant read on where you are in the chess food chain. Guppies like me—semi-promising amateurs—are usually putzing around somewhere between 1200 and 1900. Elite players weigh in above 2500, the minimum score required for a shot at the “grandmaster” title—the highest existing designation of chess office. Beyond even that enviable plateau lies the less formally defined realm of the “super-grandmaster”—we’re talking about players beyond 2700, like current World Champion Magnus Carlsen, peak rating 2882.
Every time you win, lose, or draw a game, your score is adjusted based on an equation that determines whether you’ve performed at, above, or below a level that could be expected of a player of your current rating. This means that if a grandmaster defeats a low-rated player, their rating might not be adjusted at all, but if the reverse happens, a tremendous transfer of rating points will take place, since the former result would be an entirely expected event, and the latter result would be an astounding coup.
“What’s your rating?” is almost a rude question among amateur players, because the subject is taken so seriously—desperate tears are often wept about losing a dozen rating points through a casual blunder. For anyone other than a confident chess professional, it’s a question as probing as “What’s your relationship with God?” or “Do you feel insecure about your sexual performance?” Basically, unless you’re one of the best players on the planet, your rating is a measure of your dreams’ distance.
Joseph was rated about 2092—a shade short of a master. This made a victory against him unlikely. But not impossible.
“Unrated players are kind of scary,” he said. “You might secretly be very good.”
GAME 1 JOSEPH DIAPHRAGM VS. SASHA CHAPIN
The air was hard, slippery glass in my lungs. I had worn a charcoal suit in which I was cooking, lobster-like. This sartorial choice was made in accordance with a notice I’d seen which said that players should dress in proper attire. But upon seeing the other players, I realized that I’d misinterpreted this guideline. The general state of the outfits in the room suggested that, in this case, “proper attire” meant that players should avoid wearing anything sludge-covered, ripped, or fully transparent, not that players should wear formalwear, as I was. As the games began, I felt microwaved. The tournament director announced the beginning of the round, the entire room shook hands at once, and all sound died away except for the quiet clacks of the clocks. Before me, on the board, a position was taking shape.
My dread, previously ferocious, instantly multiplied. I felt like I was gazing into the Void.
My own personal conception of existential dread is idiosyncratic. Many people, I think, are troubled by their own insignificance, preferring not to think about being a tiny part of a vanishing species in what couldn’t even be called a corner of the galaxy. Not me—I’m fine with that. Moreover, I’m not perturbed by the fact that I’ll be remembered by very few of the 108 billion people who have ever lived. Yes: I’m a standard-model dude in an endless something or other. It’s mostly fine. Endlessness is easily understood, easily labeled with a three-syllable word, placed in the dictionary beside equally simple concepts like “enchilada.” Infinity itself escapes experience, but the notion is a short phrase—it just doesn’t stop. That’s all infinity does, or rather doesn’t do. It doesn’t scare me.
What does scare me—what provokes real horror in me—is my lack of understanding. I see mental horror—the Void—in the tumbling numbers of securities trading, or the heaps of barely decipherable ancient papyrus dug up in the Middle East, or the global weather patterns that have evaded, to this date, capture by any mathematical model. I am troubled by the world’s great throngs of data—by thickets of facts I might comprehend individually, but that together make a chaos capable of receding before me as long as I live.
That’s what I felt, staring at the board in front of me. I was terrified by the profusion of possible moves offered by my pieces. Normally, even if I was playing terribly, each terrible move was the extension of a certain kind of logic—the game was comprehensible. But, in that moment, nothing was comprehensible. I felt like I couldn’t put my pieces anywhere, because I felt like I could put them everywhere, for all eternity. I essentially blacked out. My hand made moves with the assistance of my arm, while my eyes helplessly beheld their work. And, on my scorecard, I made marks that were indecipherable even by me.
I lost the game in fifteen moves, in fifteen minutes—an astonishingly brief amount of time, considering that tournament games usually last around four hours. My incompetence was outstanding. I played worse than I ever had. Calmly, I maneuvered into the Queen’s Gambit Declined defense, a safe option I usually enjoyed playing, then gave one of my rooks away for no reason at all. I began laughing a crazy, red-faced laugh. A tournament official threatened to eject me if I didn’t quiet down.
“I think I should give up,” I told Diaphragm, in a desperate and brief bid for some sympathy, in violation of the rule that players aren’t allowed to talk during tournament games other than to offer a draw or resign.
“Really?”
“Well, it’s basically over.”
“It’s completely up to you.”
“Maybe I’ll play on.”
“Good.”
I made another move. He nodded, then took the other piece I had just given him.
“I resign,” I said.
“Very well,” he said.
We shook hands.
“Would you like to analyze the game?” he said.
This is a nice part of chess tradition. Upon finishing a game, etiquette dictates that the players should at least briefly examine what’s occurred. You review the best moves, point out opportunities your opponent may have missed, and generally come to a conclusion about what kind of game you just had—an even struggle, a boring stalemate, or a clumsy brawl. When two grandmasters do this, it’s somewhat like two supercomputers having a jocular conversation. Multiplicative strings of calculation spill out from smiling faces, delivered with the giddy sing-song of fanatics dwelling on their favorite subject. But Diaphragm was asking me whether I’d enjoy teasing out the subtleties of a blunt massacre that could’ve been inflicted on my unbelievably bad play by a competent six-year-old.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s just the first game.”
“Yeah,” I said, “the first game.”
I left the hotel. All I can say about the rest of the day is that it occurred. Probably I ate noodles, like I always did. Perhaps I breathed heavily, wondering what would become of me. Noticing a light blinking at the top of a distant skyscraper seems within the realm of possibility. Really I can’t tell you.
After I slept for twelve hours, I emailed the tournament directors, announcing my resignation. I would not be attending the remaining six games. This brought me great, instant relief. Clearly, I had been right when I was a teenager—chess just wasn’t my game. A chess hobby would only lead to misery and frustration. I decided to quit, and to keep doing things I was good at.
My tourist visa expired imme
diately after the tournament. In a few days, it would be illegal for me to remain in Thailand. This was a little sad, but I figured it was about the right time to leave. While Bangkok is a city that makes most other places seem hopelessly boring, I was starting to miss the concerns of home—all the politics and fashions and acquaintanceships. They’d seemed like nothing but deluding fluff when I left Toronto, but I realized that without all that stuff, it’s hard to know what life is about, unless you’re obsessed with chess, which wasn’t the plan anymore.
So I booked a flight for New York City, where I planned to spend a short, expensive period of time before returning home. I had farewell noodles with Elena and Sally, packed my few possessions, and got on a plane. And my mind was clear and my heart was easy. Slipping through the clouds, I felt the lives I’d thought I would live peeling away. As I recalled all the people I’d met in Thailand, I briefly thought of my allies at the Bangkok Chess Club, who might wonder where I’d gone. But that didn’t really matter. Any thoughts of me would be replaced by speculations about the Berlin Defense.
Regardless, I would soon be in Brooklyn, surrounded by old friends, beautiful strangers, and deli sandwiches—matters much more consequential than a rook maneuver. I happily vowed that my life as a chess player was over.
4
A PUZZLE WITHOUT A SOLUTION
There are those moments when you’re aware that your human programming is a little defective. You become acquainted with the possibility that you’ve been designed to pursue insane commitments directly opposed to your survival. In these moments, when you feel like you need to call God on His private line and demand a refund for what He personally placed in your cranial cavity, it’s sometimes reassuring to remember that you’re probably not alone. Given the number of people who have lived and died, there’s usually someone, alive or otherwise, whose faults resemble your own. For this reason, I often seek consolation in the story of Marcel Duchamp, a man whose chess problem was a lot like mine, but dialed up to an implausible intensity.
You probably know Duchamp’s work, or have at least heard of him. Duchamp is considered one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a reputation he established by infuriating people. First, he did it with the widely mocked painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which consists of a jangling mass of shapes only vaguely suggesting a human figure doing anything at all. Then, he tried to get a urinal displayed at a major art exhibition, declaring that it was an artwork simply because of that declaration, a move rejected even by many of his artsiest peers.
Duchamp is both loved and loathed—celebrated as the man who freed artists from their old constraints, and vilified by the people who thought those constraints were a good idea. Maybe one time you went to an art gallery, and there was a bunch of stuff smeared on one wall and a pile of junk a few feet away, and you wondered where the art was. Stuff like that is partly Duchamp’s fault.
What’s not as well known about Marcel Duchamp is that, by the age of thirty-one, he had basically abandoned art in favor of chess.
This was just a spectacularly weird decision. In his twenties, Duchamp lived the most ravishing possible version of an artist’s life. His every day was boozy and carefree. He was the toast of an intellectual coterie, and his many lovers came and went. He didn’t even pay rent—a rich family took care of his accommodation in exchange for future artwork. And his few expenses were paid for by occasional French lessons he gave, by all accounts semi-competently, which were attended mostly by a gaggle of female admirers. And, although he wasn’t yet famous outside the elite New York art scene, his reputation was expanding.
So, in fact, he lived the kind of life I supposedly wanted before my adult infatuation with chess. He was a celebrity to a very specific demographic, and enjoyed a fantastic love life as a result. His eccentricities were regarded with fascination and rewarded with cash. He was doing well out there, in the non-chess arena.
But chess, which he was introduced to as an adolescent, slowly encroached on his imagination, just as it did mine. More and more, throughout his early adulthood, he was seen at a chessboard, even during parties, where he checkmated his colleagues rather than engaging in flirtation or regular whiskey talk. As his twenties drew to a close, he spent almost every evening at New York’s famous Marshall Chess Club. And after the age of thirty, although he wrote about (and sold reproductions of) his earlier work, there wasn’t much art going on. It took him a decade to complete his second-last major piece, The Large Glass, mostly because he was bored of art and preferred chess. After that, he produced exactly one sculpture. Eventually, he came to feel that chess was a nobler pursuit than art. In a 1952 interview with Time magazine, he said, “It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.”
It makes sense that Duchamp, specifically, felt this way. His work, in part, was about saying “fuck you” to grand, stuffy pieties about what art was. One of his most famous works was a defacement of the Mona Lisa: on a postcard reproduction of the original painting, he gave her a moustache and framed her with the letters LHOOQ, which, if read aloud in French, sound like the phrase “she has a hot ass.” This, as well as the infamous aforementioned urinal, were part of a series of “readymades”—mundane objects he treated as sacred artifacts. Together, these works seemingly displayed an exasperation with the dishonest pageantry of the role of art in society. They formed a serious rebellion against self-seriousness.
But in chess, of course, there is no pageantry—none of the pompousness that Duchamp’s work tried to skewer. One can’t speculate about whether a chess move is honest or dishonest. Chess can’t be pretentious, or self-serious. It’s just not that kind of thing. It’s simpler than all of that. It is what it is.
This was one part of my many-limbed fixation, as well. Being the kind of writer I am—a memoirist, I guess—has always struck me as a little sad, because it means that I’m constantly wondering whether any definable portion of my experience is marketable. I’m forever observing myself from a mercantile perspective, noting whether any of my minor melancholies or brief discomposures might be salable. Essentially, I’m a parasite on my own life. Any compelling character I meet excites me not only because they’re exciting but also because I might describe them profitably. If I met you, I’d probably wonder how I’d condense your characteristics if I needed to put you in an essay.
It just seems better out there in Chessland. Better than what I do. Better than constantly pawing at whatever occurs around me, whatever romance or dilemma, and thinking, “Maybe this could be a titillating paragraph.” Like Duchamp, I’m not entirely convinced by the validity of my profession.
Duchamp’s favorite thing, even more than playing in tournaments, was solving chess puzzles. Puzzles are how players stay sharp. You’re given a position where one side has one winning move, which, if it’s a good puzzle, is between difficult and impossible to find. All you know is the puzzle’s main instruction, something like “White to play and win.” By solving a lot of puzzles, you absorb tactical patterns that might emerge during play, so that, if they arise on the board during competition, you’ll recognize them even though you’re freaking out. They’re target practice, as well as a stress-free way of exploring the game’s possibilities. Duchamp conducted such explorations basically all the time, rising at noon after staring at chess positions until the early hours.
The natural expectation is that Duchamp, intelligent as he was, would become a great chess player, given that he loved the game so much and was so dedicated. And I’d like to tell you that he did, because that would be a lovely story of a man remaking himself through sheer will—a tale of perseverance being rewarded. Ideally, after years of forsaking companionship, money, and fame, Duchamp would’ve emerged transformed.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Duchamp got pretty good after a decade’s intense focus—better than me, certainly—but he was never excellent. At his peak, he was jus
t skilled enough to win some small-potatoes regional tournaments. (This was easier to do in the early twentieth century than it is now, in that chess was a less populated and less studied sport.) And although he was an incredibly inventive artist, he wasn’t a very inventive player. He didn’t leave behind an opening variation of his own, or any novel maneuvers—there’s no Duchamp Attack, or anything like that.
In the final analysis, Duchamp gave up being one of the great shit-stirrers of the artistic tradition, and ended up being a mild curiosity in the history of chess. He knew this, but he couldn’t stop. His obsession was such that it ended his only marriage, to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, who had to put up with Duchamp spending every day of their honeymoon in Nice at the local chess club. Before their marriage dissolved—it lasted six months—she glued his chess set’s every piece to its board, a drastic step that proved entirely futile. “I am still a victim of chess,” he said, in the aforementioned Time magazine interview.
The only significant contribution that Duchamp made to the chess literature was a puzzle he composed himself. It’s a weird puzzle, in that it doesn’t look very puzzle-like, which is to say, it doesn’t seem like a position that might yield a dramatic conclusion. It looks like a totally standard situation: it’s a rook and pawn endgame, a typical final stage of a drawn-out battle, where only rooks, pawns, and kings remain on the board. To the experienced student’s eye, it looks like a draw. Many rook and pawn endgames can’t be won by either side, if both play correctly: the rooks march around each other endlessly, sweeping away the pawns, barring the kings from doing anything decisive. In other words, Duchamp’s puzzle seems like it has no solution.
This is because it doesn’t. Give the position to a chess engine and it’ll tell you that you’re looking at a drawn game. Duchamp was an advanced enough player that he surely knew this: that although the white player possessed a pawn dangerously poised a square away from becoming a queen, the black player was entirely capable of preventing its metamorphosis. One can only conclude that the puzzle was a symbol of what chess, as a whole, meant to Duchamp: an intoxicating frustration.
